So Long, Experiential Travel. This Luxury Agency Is Out For Enrichment

“Some of our clients are so well traveled that they’re sort of over-traveled,” says Duncan Over, the cofounder and director of operations for Joro, an ultra-luxury agency specializing in what they call rare travel.

It’s not a criticism but a recognition: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful a hotel room is, or how special a place is. They’ve lost that sense of enjoyment with it.”

This is nothing new, of course. It’s why hotels have been outdoing one another for decades, and why experience has become one of marketers’ favorite words. Even Joro got its start this way almost a decade ago, when Over, a British Army veteran who’s led trips on five continents, founded the company with Henry Comyn, a wanderer whose childhood unfolded between Ethiopia, Kuwait and Hong Kong.

“When we first set out, we were focusing on the fact that these luxury hotels, despite being incredible destinations in themselves,” were missing something, explains Over. “We believed that where they were situated, there was always more that could be done from an experience point of view.”

They started “developing these stories outside and beyond these top-end hotels,” he continues. “We quite quickly moved away from [being hotel-first]. We said, ‘Let’s start focusing on the experience, and we’ll fit the accommodation to match the best experience.” Eventually, they started using yachts—via a partnership with Burgess—to work in increasingly remote places.

Now, they say the new frontier—their plan for reclaiming enjoyment—is enrichment. Partly it’s because experience has become part of the wallpaper. “I think people use the word experience to reference a physical activity—’we’re going to go and do this experience’— but when we talk about the experience of the trip, it’s multifaceted and it always involves people and an understanding of the place that we’re visiting.”

There’s an element of the usual push outside the comfort zone to find a feeling of accomplishment. (Examples abound.) Over says they’re “taking individuals who have achieved a lot throughout their careers and their personal lives and felt like they’d kind of hit a plateau.” Their aim is “giving them a renewed purpose, a renewed focus.”

Often, that means encouragement to dream bigger. A client who used to drive rally cars asked Joro if they could set up a track day for his teenage daughter, who wanted to start rally driving herself. Over’s team said, “Well, look, yes, you can do that and that’ll be a nice day, but why don’t we make this more?”

They proposed a program to get her ready to apply for her rally car license, so she and her father could compete together. The process takes a couple of years, and “they’re doing it together and it’s really special to see. He’s absolutely loving this chance to spend time with his daughter in a totally different setting, doing something that used to be a passion for him, and now educating his daughter to see whether she enjoys it.”

They’re realistic about the endgame: “She might get to the end and say, ‘“This isn’t for me,’ but that’s not really the point,” says Over. “I think that’s where it’s been really interesting. Now we feel confident enough to say, ‘Look, I know this is what you’ve said you were going to do, but there’s something we could do here that’s bigger and more imaginative and will have a lasting effect on you.’”

Another trip that didn’t start with a clear focus was with a longtime client who owned a couple of big motor yachts but dreamed of a sailing racing yacht. “He wanted to have some control over the actual aspect of sailing, but having never sailed before, he’d written it off as impossible,” says Over.

But Joro’s team wasn’t so sure. They planned a dozen trips over two years, during which he completed a course that would enable him to captain his yacht across the Atlantic. In the process, the travel agency had to get itself registered as a yachting association training school. Once that was done, they took him to the world’s best sailing locations.

“There was a mix of, ‘This is going to be extraordinary for you, and this is going to be your holiday,’” says Over. “We employed one of the top sailing instructors, who was his private instructor throughout this program. It resulted in him becoming an ocean master, which is the highest sailing qualification. He passed with flying colors. He’d sailed in some of the most complicated and difficult conditions in the world but also ticked off [spots on] most people’s dream bucket list of cruising grounds.”

Eventually, he sailed across the Atlantic and now races his yacht as the captain. But more than that, “he’s been very vocal in terms of what that’s meant to him and how it’s changed his perspective. It’s changed his enjoyment of his free time and everything else.”

Enrichment doesn’t necessarily take the form of adventure. Another client came to Joro as he was developing an “extraordinary” hotel in Los Angeles and wanted inspiration. He said he had a deep passion for Brazilian architecture but had never explored it fully. Now he wanted to explore it, along with the architects who were working on the LA hotel.

“We gathered them all up and took them through Brazil on this sort of detailed, very purpose-led, very educational trip, and the results were extraordinary,” says Over. “We focused on Oscar Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and we had their grandchildren taking us around their private homes and showing us behind-the-scenes stuff, really going into their original notes where they came up with some of these design things.”

Although that trip was born from an educational perspective, there was a high level of luxury and enjoyment. “They all came back saying that they’d never been on a trip like that, where they actually came away individually inspired but also having had an amazing time away.”

Sometimes the results are extraordinary for the people Joro’s travelers visit. Once, they sent noted British bronze sculptor Charlie Smith along for a trip to Ol Jogi, the Wildenstein family’s extraordinary safari lodge in Kenya. “The client was just like, ‘What are we doing? Why are we taking this person with us on holiday?’ I was like, ‘You just need to trust me, bear with me on this,’” recalls Over.

A few days in, once they’d seen the big five, they started taking Smith along on game drives. The rhythm slowed. Instead of taking a few photos of an elephant and moving on, they watched the artist as he set about sculpting the animal in clay. That encouraged a closer form of observation and brought about new conversations.

Meanwhile, Ol Jogi sponsors a local artist, and the camp managers invited him to watch Smith working at the camp. He said it had always been his dream to be a sculptor, which opened a conversation between everyone in the room. The clients ended up sponsoring a trip for the Kenyan artist to come to the UK and study with Smith. They also organized an exhibition in London and sold Smith’s works from the trip to raise money to support Ol Jogi’s philanthropic endeavors.

“That is where we talk about enrichment” in travel, says Over. “There was an experience in itself, but everyone came away from it with very different levels of enrichment. They’d experienced the animals we were looking at differently; they’d experienced Africa differently. And it was one of the main highlights of the trip—just having these people around and how that sort of snowballed into other elements. And that happens all the time.”

MORE FROM FORBES

ForbesImmersive Luxury Travel Goes Next-Level With This Exclusive Paris GameBy Ann AbelForbesInside A Billionaire Banker’s Laboratory For Sustainable Luxury TravelBy Ann AbelForbesWhere To Go In 2025: 15 Ideas For Unforgettable, Responsible TravelBy Ann Abel